The departure of John Edwards — a brief shining, moment in American history all by his handsome, lonesome self — from the U.S. presidential race was a kick in the teeth. Or would have been if I’d had any teeth left after seven years of Bush rule. I am down to my bleeding gums.

At times, Edwards seemed like the last honourable person in U.S. politics. He said sensible things; it shouldn’t have required bravery to say them, but it did.

And as much as I dread writing a eulogy upon the death of courage, it must be said. We only occasionally show personal courage, and in Western nations, collectively we show none at all.

Bold over

Edwards wanted a quick end to the Iraq catastrophe, he was openly contemptuous of corporate bullying, he backed universal health care and he favoured a renewed devotion to good education for all young Americans. Most of all, he said wealth inequality — the worst since 1928 — is breaking his nation in half.

But so low has that once-great nation sunk that Edwards came across like Martin Luther nailing “I Totally Disagree 95 Times” to the Wittenberg church door in 1517. The Holy Roman Empire announced that it was okay to kill Luther — in fact, please do so. Edwards’ giving up on the presidential race is the modern political equivalent of this ancient fatwa. His dream is dead, his political platform declared heresy.

Americans talk a good game about free speech. Brutal, vulgar misogyny and race-baiting from the men at CNN and Fox is acceptable. But saying aloud that managed health-care firms are the biggest block to public health care — why, that’s decried both as communism and fascism. Bold Americans like Edwards are shouted into failure.

I’m always on the side of the underdog, in this case Edwards. The overdog, meaning the Republicans, can always buy a private plane or one of the new sex robots or snort a fine H-bomb (ecstasy and heroin). But the reason for my defending a bold American in this case comes from a different concern — that the U.S. is starting to look like Canada. It has adopted our traits of timidity and lack of leadership. Is cowardice too strong a word?

Without a peep

In a recent case of cravenness here, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared “there will be no nuclear accident,” and restarted the Chalk River nuclear reactor, despite the advice of its management, who told him the risk of a nuclear accident was one in 1,000. The international standard is one in a million.

Harper, who is not a nuclear scientist, seems to despise highly trained people, especially if employed by the federal government. The Chalk River incident puts political point-making ahead of the public good.

Anyone in the region was endangered by the decision. But I took it personally, and I don’t understand why no one else appeared to react in the same way.

No Canadians rioted. I thought the government should have fallen, but it did not. Not a newspaper went ballistic. Peter Mansbridge read the news as slowly as usual. No mainstream public forum reflected the disgust many Canadians felt when they realized that scientific warnings and human safety were trumped in a showdown between a prime minister with rage issues and a female scientist who had made him look bad.

Global view

It isn’t just Canadians and Americans who have caved in, become squeakless scuttling creatures. Even the Brits are cowed, largely by the mendacious, corrupt Blair reign and the co-reign of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which rules both print and TV.

The Blair regime, enraged by BBC reporting over the “sexed-up dossier” of Downing St. lies that took Britain into Iraq and disaster, exacted its revenge. It fired the BBC director-general and replaced him with a professional apologizer who then slashed the jewelled heart of the BBC, its journalism. A huge chunk of Britain’s license fee funding meant for the BBC is now about to go to Murdoch’s Sky TV. (Britons own the BBC network; Murdoch owns the Sky network.)

The British public reacted with cowardice, although Matthew Norman of The Independent nailed his colours to the mast:

“The natural supporters of traditional BBC values look glumly on, too battered by 30 years of Murdochian assaults on excellence (“elitism”) in the sacred cause of mass-market mediocrity (“accessibility”) to do more than whinge, as I am doing today, as the last truly great entity in British life is denuded and devalued, its wrists cut and its lifeblood ready to begin slowly seeping away.

“The result of the war to defend traditional BBC values was decided âe¦ when ‘liberal’ became regarded as a swear word and ‘elitism’ as a social transmitted disease.âe¦ Mr. Murdoch has never had better reason to cackle with glee.”

Incredible shrinking rights

In the past decade, U.S. citizens have seen shrinkage of their rights of free speech, habeas corpus, and freedom from torture; their independent press; the line between church and state; and the separation of powers.

Britain has lost or is losing many of its publicly owned assets — water, rail, schools, the London Tube, air traffic control — and the BBC is sliding irretrievably downward, which will mean the slow death of literacy in a nation that used to lead the world.

Here in Canada, we have a government at war with its own bureaucracy, “equality” for women is officially no longer sought, the CBC is running criminally short of money, our infrastructure is cratering, we have no plan to cope with, much less reduce, global warming, Parliament’s question period sounds like peasants fighting with cudgels and pikestaffs, and the government plays fast and loose with the desire of Canadians not to be irradiated.

And no one is demonstrating. No one is orating, or even shouting. We’ll get what’s coming to us. It’s what happens to people who don’t defend their rights.

This Week

Here’s another example of Canadian willingness to take abuse without question. It was recently alleged (unfairly, I think) that a Texas prosecutor referred to blacks on a Houston jury as “Canadians,” thus leading some Canadians to think they were regarded as lesser.

In fact, many Texans would not even be aware of the existence of Canada. What they do know is the Canadian River, a tributary of the Arkansas River, that runs east-southeast through the Texas Panhandle. It derives from the Mexican-Spanish word “cañada,” meaning “small canyon” or a cliff edge along a river that is a natural barrier for sheep herds.

The tilde over the n was dropped by ye olde mapmakers, “Canadian” became a Texas slur, and today Canadians are mystified by news of their unpopularity in George Bush’s hometown.

Here’s your prize: The above information comes from Annie Proulx’s 2002 novel That Old Ace in the Hole, about young Bob Dollar, an agent for industrial hog farming, who sets out to buy up land in the Panhandle. It’s a great novel, although you will never eat pork again.